Machine translation may refer to many different techniques and/or collections of tools related to automatically translating from one human language to another. The term “human language” is used herein to refer to languages that people typically use to converse with one another. It designates both organically developed languages, such as English, Basque, and Vietnamese, and invented languages, such as Esperanto and American Sign Language. It also designates both “living” languages such as Hindi and “dead” or “extinct” languages, such as Latin. The term is used in contradistinction to computer languages, such as C or LISP, which are artificial languages that are primarily used by people to express computations to a machine.
At its most basic level, machine translation may refer to mechanical substitution of single words in a target language for corresponding words in a source language (which may sometimes be referred to herein as the primary, or working language). This type of translation is usually unsatisfactory and often incomprehensible, for it commonly fails to account for varying grammatical rules, idioms, and language anomalies and/or idiosyncrasies. Although the field of machine translation has seen developments in past years, existing systems and methods still do not provide efficient systems for instantaneous and continuous translation of input at the same time by different users and into multiple languages simultaneously.